IBM Says It's 'On the Cusp' of Building a Quantum Computer

A team of IBM researchers reports that several recent advances put them 'close to the minimum requirements for a full-scale quantum computing system.'

IBM scientists said Tuesday that they have made several breakthroughs in quantum computing that put them "on the cusp of building systems that will take computing to a whole new level."

The IBM researchers said they have established three new records "for retaining the integrity of quantum mechanical properties in quantum bits, or qubits, and reducing errors in elementary computations." Those advances, presented at this week's annual American Physical Society meeting, get the team "close to the minimum requirements for a full-scale quantum computing system as determined by the world-wide research community."

Quantum computing, first proposed by the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman in 1981, is still highly theoretical, with experiments in the science and its cousin, quantum cryptography, limited to laboratory settings thus far. In other words, there are no practical quantum computers yet, just experimental ones.

The basic concept is to use the odd nature of the entangled qubits (a magnified qubit is pictured below) that one uses to build a quantum computer to perform computational tasks much faster and much more securely than is possible on digital computers that use silicon transistors.

At the exceedingly tiny level where quantum mechanics operates, particles of matter can exist in multiple statessuch as "on" and "off" to reference the binary process by which digital computing operatesat the same time. We may not be able to comprehend what this means outside of mathematics, but scientists have theorized for several decades that harnessing these properties for computing would be a natural way past the issues that loom for today's nanoscale silicon-based transistors, which are running up against atomic-level barriers to functionality the smaller they get.

"The special properties of qubits will allow quantum computers to work on millions of computations at once, while desktop PCs can typically handle minimal simultaneous computations," the IBM researchers said. "For example, a single 250-qubit state contains more bits of information than there are atoms in the universe.

"These properties will have wide-spread implications foremost for the field of data encryption and other possible applications such as searching databases of unstructured information, performing a range of optimization tasks and solving previously unsolvable mathematical problems," the team added, further elaborating on the possibilities of quantum computing in the video below.

IBM's superconducting qubit device suspends a roughly one-millimeter qubit in the center of a cavity on a small Sapphire chip (pictured below). The cavity "is formed by closing the two halves, and measurements are done by passing microwave signals to the connectors," the team said. The "3D" device looks rather big relative to the tiny conventional computer chips currently in use, but the team said that future scaling should make it possible to operate hundreds or even thousands of qubits in just such a device.

The team has also demonstrated a two-dimensional chip that houses three qubits (pictured below, with qubits 1 through 3 identified). This 8mm-by-4mm chip "is back-mounted on a PC board and connects to I/O coaxial lines via wire bonds. IBM scientists also envision scaling this design to the point where a larger assembly of qubits would be possible on such a chip.

It should be noted that the recent scientific paper published by a different group of international researchers concerning the successful fabrication of an atom-sized silicon transistor isn't an advance in quantum computing, per se.

The team led Michelle Simmons of the University of New South Wales in Sydney demonstrated a repeatable process for making a working microchip transistor comprised of a single atomnearly 100 times smaller than the 22-nanometer cutting-edge transistors fabricated by Intelbut the process is compatible with the CMOS technology used in transistor fabrication today.

Simmons and her colleagues have taken the miniaturization of silicon-based processors to the limit of what may be possible within the confines of current microprocessor architectures and manufacturing processes, but quantum computing researchers are attempting to redefine computing (and possibly semiconductor manufacturing) entirely.

That said, the IBM team noted that it has chosen to "employ superconducting qubits which use established microfabrication techniques developed for silicon technology, providing the potential to one day scale up to and manufacture thousands or millions of qubits."

Damon Poeter got his start in journalism working for the English-language daily newspaper The Nation in Bangkok, Thailand. He covered everything from local news to sports and entertainment before settling on technology in the mid-2000s. Prior to joining PCMag, Damon worked at CRN and the Gilroy Dispatch. He has also written for the San Francisco Chronicle and Japan Times, among other newspapers and periodicals.
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